Knockin' on Heaven's Door

Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, star-crossed lovers returning to New York after a long journey abroad, are reluctantly parting, but planning to reunite six months hence. "You name the place, and I'll obey," Kerr says excitedly as their ship steams up the Hudson. Behind her, the Empire State Building passes into the frame, an elegant giant in the city's skyline. Grant suggests the building's observation deck. "Oh, yes, that's perfect!" Kerr replies. "It's the nearest thing to heaven we have in New York."

When I first arrived in New York over a decade ago, I had no such life-altering reason to ascend to the Empire State Building's top, as Grant and Kerr had in the 1957 three-hankie movie "An Affair to Remember." Yet a few days after I had dropped my bags, there I was. In a way I found difficult to articulate, I felt that I could not fully appreciate the city's grandeur without first climbing its loftiest heights and reveling in the view.

Starting Tuesday, Top of the Rock, a restored observatory at Rockefeller Center, will begin doing battle with the Empire State Building for the admiration of newly arrived visitors like me. To reach Top of the Rock, visitors will shoot 67 stories high aboard an elevator with a glass ceiling. They will emerge into a "Grand Viewing Room" that offers north and south perspectives on the city.

From there, they can ascend to the 70th-floor deck, a narrow, 190-foot long promenade whose original design in the 1930's resembled a ship's deck, complete with Adirondack chairs and vents resembling smoke stacks, according to Daniel Okrent's history of Rockefeller Center, "Great Fortune." The restoration promises luxurious surroundings and the same jaw-dropping, 360-degree views that once drew huge crowds to the space before it was closed in 1986, when the Rainbow Room was expanded.

As with the many skirmishes to claim the title of New York's tallest building, the quest forthe city's finest view also comes steeped in a history of competition. In the 19th century, sightseers paid a few pennies to climb a creaking wooden staircase inside the steeple of the 284-foot-high Trinity Church for a bird's-eye view of the city, at the time a low, flat landscape of five-story mud-brown buildings. The small platform within the Statue of Liberty's torch trumped this observation point by about 30 feet, but it closed for structural reasons about the time that New York's first great observation deck opened on the 58th floor of the 792-foot Woolworth Tower, in 1913.

Frank Woolworth, the five-and-dime king, realized the advantage of his skyscraper's aerie perch and set the trend for attracting visitors to its top. In the overwrought brochure promoting his "Cathedral of Commerce," Woolworth boasted: "The thrilling sensation which comes over the sightseer that is never to be forgotten. It is indeed the most remarkable if not the most wonderful view in all the world."

More than 100,000 visitors a year doubtless agreed. "You'll be bewildered," he promised with less decorum, at the sight of the "multitudes of people scurrying about the busy streets" who "resemble an aggregation of pygmies." His skyscraper maintained its pre-eminence until the Roaring Twenties duel that gave rise to the Chrysler and Empire State towers.

The story of the height race between these buildings is widely known. The secret spires and last-minute design changes to seize the crown of world's tallest is part of the city's legend. But these skyscrapers also competed for visitors.

On the Chrysler Building observation deck, 71 stories high, one entered a fantastic chamber with vaulted ceilings painted with celestial motifs and hanging glass Saturns. In news releases and brochures, Chrysler promised a "magnificent vista" of a hundred miles from its triangular windows.

As in the height race, however, Chrysler lost to the Empire State when that building's open-air observation decks on the 86th and 102nd floors opened a year later in 1931, attracting a couple of thousand visitors a day. John J. Raskob, the skyscraper's chief financier, relished the monthly reports detailing how much business he had taken away from his competitor. Good thing, since the rest of his building was largely empty of tenants.

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The Empire State's deck ruled without peer until the opening of the deck atop Rockefeller Center. Then, in the 1970's, the World Trade Center towers laid claim to the highest observatory with a deck above the 110th floor of the South Tower. The Sept. 11 attacks returned the Empire State to its unrivaled position. Only after a recent trip there was I reminded of the great absence in the skyline created by the loss of the twin towers. From the observation deck's south side, I kept looking downtown in search of something I would never see again.

My visit made me wonder, not for the first time, why these aeries have such a powerful allure. The benefit to a building owner's coffers is obvious, but what is it about observation decks that make them such a compelling draw, luring hundreds of thousands of out-of-towners and playing starring roles as meeting places for fictional lovers on film?

The answer, of course, has to do with point of view. At the base of the city's canyons, we can look up at the leap of steel and stone of a skyscraper, but this hardly does justice to the buildings' magnificence. Their height can be truly appreciated only from a distance, as part of the skyline, or, more significant, as a vantage point from which to gaze down on the city and the expanse beyond. Much like a mountaintop, they beg to be surmounted.

After the Eiffel Tower was completed in 1889, its observation deck not only became an instant attraction, it also revolutionized the way Parisians looked at their landscape. The art critic Robert Hughes likened the experience of viewing the city from the tower to seeing the first photograph of Earth from space. Parisian artists who up to that point had focused on perspective and depth began to look at landscapes in terms of patterns and planes -- part of the influence that brought about the Cubist movement. The views from the Empire State Building have amazed and reshaped people's views of New York in a similar manner for years. No doubt the view from the Top of the Rock will do the same.

Looking toward my Greenwich Village neighborhood from the observation deck of the Empire State Building, I realized that given the broad sweep of the city, my life was a small affair. But on this trip, as on so many others, I also felt exhilaration. From this height, New York revealed its beautiful secrets: the gridiron pattern of the streets, the scale of each building to those around it, the waters that first brought the city to life, the hustle and flow of the people who sustained it now. For a moment, I felt alone with the city at my feet.

Later, speaking with a few of the sightseers crowded around the observation deck, I realized they felt some of the same things. An English couple, who were making their second trip to the Empire State's observation deck, spoke of understanding the city's massiveness only after seeing it from so high an elevation.

A visitor from Oregon added: "All my life, I've wanted to come here. Now I'm 74, and I finally made it."

NEW YORK OBSERVED Neal Bascomb is the author of "The Perfect Mile" and "Higher: A Historic Race to the Sky and the Making of a City."

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A version of this article appears in print on October 30, 2005, on Page 14014003 of the National edition with the headline: NEW YORK OBSERVED; Knockin' on Heaven's Door. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe